Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer's life.

Lovers are not snails; they don't have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self.

I do not gather things, I prefer to rent them rather than to possess them.

Can the imagination, any more than the boy, be held prisoner ?" - from the foreword to the 1976 edition of "The Painted Bird

People say, "Well, you went on television, it enlarged your readership." It did not at all, not at all. I might as well tell you, I lost some readership, because the profound audience felt somehow bothered by my too easy manner.

I suppress in my prose any language which calls attention to itself.

It seems that what I really want is a drug that will increase my consciousness of others, not myself.